infobong.com the absurd courts the vulgar

One of my research projects this semester is an oral history of the TV-Smash events that took place at the late, great Austin coffeeshop Mojo’s Daily Grind. With oral history, comes the work of transcribing interviews. In the past, I’ve recorded interviews on cassette tape and typed them into Microsoft Word. This makes for pretty tedious work, starting and stopping the player, while I scramble to type. It took me three to four times as long as the recording to transcribe with this method. This semester, I learned of a device called a “transcription machine” that allows you to operate the cassette deck with a foot pedal, but I took a different approach. I recorded the interviews using the voice recorder on my digital point-and-shoot (mostly because I didn’t want to check out a tape recorder from school), transfered the audio files to my computer, and typed them up with the transcription application Transcriva.

Good gravy, Transcriva is awesome. I can’t say that it makes transcription fun, but it streamlines the process substantially. It allows you to play back an audio file and type your transcriptions in the same window. Keyboard shortcuts allow you to stop and start the audio track while typing. (You can also rewind and fast-forward through shortcuts.) It links your text with points in the recording, so you can find your place in the audio by referencing the text. And you can set it to “backtrack on pause,” so it autmatically rewinds a second or three each time you restart the audio. It took me a while to get a hang of some of the keyboard shortcuts, but I’m certain I picked it up faster than I would learn to use the transcription machine. The full-featured version costs $19.99, but the trial version has all of the features I need. If you do oral history or ethnographic work, I highly recommend this little OS X application.

Update: It turns out I do need the full-featured version of Transcriva after all. It disables the audio playback functions after 20 minutes (of audio, not use). Unless you’re transcribing very short segments, you’ll probably want to pay the $19.99, which is pretty inexpensive for such a useful package.

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Following Nigel, I had to participate in the Wikipedia what-happened-on-your-birthday meme. Here’s a selection of events…

• 68 BC - Battle of Artaxata: Lucullus averts the bad omen of this day by defeating Tigranes the Great of Armenia.
• 1582 - Due to the implementation of the Gregorian calendar, this day is skipped in Italy, Poland, Portugal and Spain.
• 1846 - George Westinghouse, American engineer and inventor born.
• 1889 - Thomas Edison shows his first motion picture
• 1927 - Opening of The Jazz Singer, the first prominent talking movie.
• 1939 - Last Polish army is defeated in World War II.
• 1946 - Lloyd Doggett, American politician born
• 1966 - LSD is declared illegal in the United States.
• 1981 - Anwar al-Sadat is assassinated.
• 1998 - Gay-bashing: Near Laramie, Wyoming, University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard is viciously attacked by two assailants for being gay.
• 2000 - Slobodan Milošević resigns.

Well, a few important moments in media history took place on my birthday, and I share birthdays with my congressman, as well as Le Corbusier and Thor Heyerdahl.

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I’ve been thinking a lot about memes lately, probably because I have to give a class presentation about Mark Poster’s “Perfect Transmissions: Evil Bert Bin Laden” in a few weeks. Poster’s essay examines how the “Sesame Street” character Bert made a cameo appearance in a pro-Bin Laden poster that was widely reported by the Western media. Poster’s argument is primarily about how images and information are disseminated globally in often context-less ways that often create strange juxtapositions and produce new meanings.

My problem with the essay is two-fold. First, it treats the Bert is Evil image as a special case, rather than a fairly common online phenomenon - isn’t the Bert Bin Laden poster another case of the same phenomenon that gave rise to this Oolong the pancake bunny image or this Domo-kun image? Secondly, he doesn’t really provide an explananation for the overall phenomenon of replicating and recontextualizing images. Like the Bert Bin Laden poster, these images rely on cultural symbols that are placed into a new context, but in these cases it’s Japanese culture transmogrified into American (or at least Anglophone) Internet culture. Isn’t there a more universal process going on?

Which brings me to memes. There are even more things I don’t like about “memetics.” The theory wants to assign agency to information that I don’t think is warranted. People disseminate these ideas and images - I find it hard to believe they propagate themselves. Secondly, the theory was proposed by Richard Dawkins, a non-media specialist, and when people outside communications and media studies start theorizing about the media, reductionist folk theories start to propagate. (Noam Chomsky and, to a lesser extent, George Lakoff are examples of non-specialists making reductionist claims.) I know little about the psychological research that has followed Dawkins’ proposal of memetics, but I’d never be able to get away with claiming that “information is like a virus,” and I don’t think I would beleive it myself. I’m more interested in the social contexts of these “mash-ups” and how the symbolic power of the images persists.

I suppose the short-term solution is to use “meme” in a folky sense. Since that’s the term used online to describe artifacts like Oolong and Domo-kun, it make sense to use it. In terms of a larger research project, I imagine it’s possible to study the meme phenomenon online, while refusing to subscribe to any notion of memetics.

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Sweet Sassy Molassy, Mark Cuban is coming to the RTF department! Cuban is a pretty polarizing figure, and I’m not sure what to make of him sometimes, but I do think he has interesting things to say that relate to my research, so I’m excited about the talk. He’ll be here in April as part of the master class series. I knew I’d already missed Mike Judge a few weeks back, but I only now looked at the master class schedule, and John Pierson, who teaches producing in the department, has lined up an impressive list of speakers. Richard Linklater is speaking this week, and Kevin Smith, Chuck Norris, and Ray Harryhausen are also coming.

Studio 4D can get crowded pretty fast, and I’m told Mike Judge’s appearance was totally crazy. The department has set up seating priorities that privileges students in Pierson’s class first, then gives seats to RTF students and faculty, other UT folks, and, finally, the general public.

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I think I was already aware of Amazon’s recent introduction of product Wikis, either from talking about them in Don’s Semantic Web class or just browsing the site. But I didn’t really think about what they would do until now. At first blush, a Wiki for each product would seem helpful. With a Wiki, you can read positive and negative perspectives on a product in a single blurb, instead of scrolling through user review after user review. Of course, this could also give undue emphasis on minority opinions, but I don’t think that’s entirely a bad thing.

The feature doesn’t seem to be catching on quickly. A glance at the “Most Edited Wikis” page reveals that the wiki with the most edits is the controversial novel A Million Little Pieces with 76 edits. The number of edits per item falls of sharply. An article with a moderate amount of traffic on Wikipedia could easily get 76 edits in a month, so these wikis aren’t particularly active. In addition, the 1839 Wikis available is only a slim slice of Amazon’s catalog, and most of these are Wikis with a single edit.

Finally, it seems like hosting Wikis could present a lot of administrative hassles for Amazon. Do they have an employee managing the inevitable conflicts that will emerge from edit wars and thin skins? And while Wikipedia is not immune from the threat of legal action, because Amazon is clearly a for-profit entity, it could be much more vulnerable to litigation from unhappy authors. Or authors could become “page divas,” constantly monitoring a page and reverting unfavorable edits.

It will be interesting to see how this experiment hashes out. This seems like a better application of Wikis than the LA Times “Wikitorials” debacle, since there’s plenty of information that is uncontroversial about products that could be shared in a Wiki.

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Over on bOINGbOING, there’s a post that lauds Wikinews’ efforts to document the disingenuous edits that some congressional staffers have made on articles about their bosses. Xeni says, “Wikinews seems to be doing a much better job at connecting the data dots than some of the larger commercial news organizations covering the story — not because Wikinews volunteers have access to facts that other reporters do not, but because they appear to be looking harder for them.” I think we need to define “access.” The facts in question - such as IP addresses of computers used for editing - are certainly publicly available, but I’m not sure they’re completely accessible. In my own research on Wikipedia, it took time for me to develop a level of Wikipedia literacy to understand how the project operates. I don’t think you can expect a political reporter or a generalist to know how to find the “history” page and be able to decode the information while working under deadline. It’s not a function of reportorial laziness, but a function of time spent participating on the site and knowledge needed to analyze the available information. In this case, we probably need to think about “access” in the sense of a poem being “accessible.” Reporters won’t have the cultural and technical knowledge to access this information, while a teeming horde of Wikiheads and bloggers will.

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